Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday August 12, 2010 @09:55PM
from the iphone-is-all-the-rage dept.

glenkim writes "Kotaku has posted their liveblog of the QuakeCon 2010 keynote, with some big announcements by game developer and Slashdot regular John Carmack. Highlights include a video of the id Tech 5 engine (aka Rage) running on the iPhone 4G at 60fps, with claims that it also runs on the iPhone 3GS. Carmack noted that performance on the iPhone was able to 'kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2.' He also announced the source code release of two games, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Also, Carmack finally admitted that Doom 3 was too dark!"

I was hoping they'd port full doom1 and doom2 to the doom3 engine as an expansion pack. There'd be little programming effort there, mostly art and modelling. If they went for a more modernized game, with a similar feel and speed of the old one people would line up for it for sure. Well... I'd buy it.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a modern FPS that captures the speed, fun, and simplicity of Doom 1 and 2? I enjoy games like Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield, but sometimes I'd like something fast, fun and disposable... the Mario Kart of shooting people, if you will.

In a gaming world now dominated by Counterstrikey FPSs, Serious Sam is a throwback to the days of Doom when waves and waves of enemies are just thrown at you. The classic running and gunning bass-ackwards is still a valid tactic in this game:)

Best of all, story mode coop play is supported, a feature missing in most games nowadays.

Awful graphics? It was the first game I played that used S3TC (although my card didn't support it at the time) and used huge textures. You could walk right up to walls and see details, when other games at the time just had vague textures. It was also the first FPS I played that allowed really huge game worlds.

Totally agree on the fun though. Deathmatch was a bit rubbish - the large worlds meant that you'd just bounce around miles away from each other, watching rockets go slowly past. In single playe

Does anyone have a recommendation for a modern FPS that captures the speed, fun, and simplicity of Doom 1 and 2? I enjoy games like Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield, but sometimes I'd like something fast, fun and disposable... the Mario Kart of shooting people, if you will.

And on a serious note, a sibling suggested serious sam, which is a good one. It doesnt have the narrow passages of doom, its more open areas with massive waves comming at you, but that is probably as close as you can get, other various more simple shooters still tend to muck things up with stories and puzzles

Oh, try painkiller by the way! its a bit older (ca 2003), and the setting is somewhat different, but in terms of gameplay, it is a nice mix between serious sam and doom

It was actually pretty poor. I guess you you'd never played Tribes, or any of the Battlefield games you could think it was good... but Battlefield: 2142 basically did everything ET:QW did, with better balance, and was released earlier.

The funny thing is that the original Enemy Territory game on the Wolfenstein engine was actually really innovative. But by the time Quake Wars came out, everything they did was old-hat and they didn't improve on it at all. (And in some ways, they anti-improved on it! The grid

I only played the Quake Wars demo but the movement and combat on foot seemed vastly smoother and more natural (read: Quake-like) than any of the Battlefield games. It seems to me that a lot of recent id games have had strong technical merits but not so great gameplay. *Shrug*

The engine was a total flop. It didn't look very good, personally I'd say Unreal Engine 2.5 (UT2004) looked better, and especially for the hardware it required. When Unreal Engine 3 came out, it was done. The complete list of games on the Doom 3 engine is:

Doom 3Doom 3: Resurrection of EvilQuake 4PreyEnemy Territory: Quake WarsWolfenstein (the new one from 2009)

And Brink is using it, scheduled for 2011. That's it. 5 titles, one expansion for the whole engine. Compare this to the about 100-150 games for Unreal Engine 3. Games devs just did not care for iD Tech 4 (the Doom 3 engine) at all.

The Rage engine, however, should be a different matter entirely. The MegaTexture tech gives developers the capability of porting their present-day Xbox360 and PS3 games to the Xbox4 and PS4 platforms with an immediate boost to graphic quality. If id is smart enough, they will have the game code separate from the engine code. Hell, if they do that, id might do the porting for free. In fact, that might make solid business sense, given the value that id has in the megatex tech. Keep the engine code binary-only

Bethesda doesn't have a partner publishing program like EA and THQ do. That implies it will be a more traditional, "We own the IP" publisher/developer relationship. That's especially worrisome for smaller independent studios. Larger studios can possibly have the clout to maintain their IP. But, most large studios are not independent, they're owned by publishers that compete with Bethesda.. There's no way an EA, Activision, THQ, TakeTwo, or Ubisoft studio will use idtech5. Along with that liability on the engine there are no shipped games to prove the engine is viable, it's not known what the dev support will be like, and there is no one outside of Id that has experience with it.

Unreal rules the roost right now. There's no publisher lock-in, there are hundreds of games to prove it's viability, the dev support is all online, easily referenced, and complete, and the widespread use of it means that it is easy to find programmers, designers, and artists that have experience on the toolset. idtech5 has to not only be as good as unreal in all of those areas, it arguably has to be better. A studio that knows how to make games with Unreal would have to dump all of their institutional knowledge if they went with idtech5. That's a huge loss of competitive advantage.

Idtech5 might do amazingly well. Given the long timespan since choosing an id engine to make a game was commonplace, the explosion of Unreal as the defacto engine middleware, a decent number of other competing engine middleware packages (Gamebryo, Crytek, Unity, etc...), and the Bethesda lockin I am not expecting idtech5 to be a disrupting force in the game development industry.

Unreal rules the roost right now. There's no publisher lock-in, there are hundreds of games to prove it's viability, the dev support is all online, easily referenced, and complete, and the widespread use of it means that it is easy to find programmers, designers, and artists that have experience on the toolset. idtech5 has to not only be as good as unreal in all of those areas, it arguably has to be better. A studio that knows how to make games with Unreal would have to dump all of their institutional knowledge if they went with idtech5. That's a huge loss of competitive advantage.

Maybe that's why they went for lock-in? Because id isn't really a strong competitor in the "game engine market" anymore?

The engine "flopped" because id didn't push it as a commercial engine in the same way they did with id Tech 3. They had been there, dealt with the tech support for external devs and companies, and found they just didn't want to do that again. Aside from a couple of close-knit companies there was no encouragement to use it. Epic, on the other hand, took the corporate angle, focused on building and marketing a sellable engine, and provided a commercial support network that encouraged lots of reuse.

Myself and a friend used to have a shitload of fun in this exact scenario. We did our own version of Co-Op mode, I was good with the shotgun, he was good with the MG, we'd swap back and forth as we ran out of bullets for our weapon of choice. Throwing the controller across the room in the middle of trying not to die added an awesomely fun level of excitement to the gameplay.

The problem was that the shadows were hard. The the real world, light bounces. This is why if you turn on a flashlight, you can see things in the room not in the beam. Light bounces off one surface, then off another and so on. You can simulate this via radiosity on computers. Problem is that is real expensive computationally. You don't do it in realtime. So generally what most games do is a cheap global illumination. There is an all pervasive amount of light applied to everything, and then specific dynamic lighting.

Well in Doom 3, there was no GI, and all light bounced only once. So anything directly illuminated, you saw. However anything else, was completely dark. Shadows were complete, there was no shadowed corner where things were visible, but barely.

The problem was that the shadows were hard. The the real world, light bounces. This is why if you turn on a flashlight, you can see things in the room not in the beam. Light bounces off one surface, then off another and so on. You can simulate this via radiosity on computers. Problem is that is real expensive computationally. You don't do it in realtime. So generally what most games do is a cheap global illumination. There is an all pervasive amount of light applied to everything, and then specific dynamic lighting.

Well in Doom 3, there was no GI, and all light bounced only once. So anything directly illuminated, you saw. However anything else, was completely dark. Shadows were complete, there was no shadowed corner where things were visible, but barely.

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

On the contrary, it's very visible. Without global illumination, 3D scenes look very 'fake' to observers, even if they don't know why. In contrast, scenes rendered with a high quality GI algorithm look much more realistic, even with flat colouring or simple textures and little detail. For example, Valve often makes "untextured" maps for play testing with only GI lighting applied. They look surprisingly good, despite every surface having nothing but a plain placeholder texture.

Ironically, maps with pre-computed GI for lighting was a feature that I'm fairly sure was either invented by id software's John Carmack, or he was the first person to implement it in a widely used game engine. It surprised me that he dropped the feature in Doom 3, when it was one of the more impressive technical advancements in his previous games!

In general, Doom 3 seemed to me to be a game that tried to be so technically advanced in a few specific areas that it had to compromise in others, resulting in an engine that wasn't very good overall. John Carmack even made a comment in a forum before the game's release that he was "targeting" 30fps, which to me felt like a bit of an admission of failure, because at the time every other game engine was already aiming for a constant 60fps, which is the minimum for smooth game play.

Well, it depends on what you count as a "frame". NTSC does 60 interlaced "fields" per second, but each field is only every other line, so you get a full screen refresh at around 30 fps, though that's admittedly a different effect from noninterlaced 30 fps.

Sorry, I have to totally disagree, and I know what I'm talking about, having both developed 3D game engines professionally, and having used real high-refresh rate CRT monitors.

The thing is that a moving object on the screen can only be seen at a single static position with each frame. With 24fps, those positions are far apart, say, several centimeters on the screen. A human can track a moving object with their eyes quite accurately. In a real-life scene the moving object will be sharp and the background mot

Even at the movies, the projector shows each frame twice for slightly less than 1/48th of a second each time. 24 fps is really low for human persistence of vision; it was chosen because film stock is expensive and it was about the lowest one could get away with with a straight face (25/30 fps for PAL/NTSC was chosen because it allows you to use the AC power for timing rather than adding electronics and raising the price of a set). Super-8 film cameras go even lower, at 18fps, but the motion is noticeably

Indeed, I should have made myself clearer, when I said that global illumination isn't particularly visible, I'm only talking about when the direct light is exposed correctly, as is usually the case when you're looking at an environment illuminated by a flash [wikimedia.org](or a flash-light that's close to the camera:) ) . However when the direct light is overexposed, for example a room lit by a window [flickr.com], then the indirect is very important.

Doom wouldn't run on a 286, silly man, though Wolfenstein 3D did.:P I seem to remember anything south of a 386DX/25 being kind of a stretch for Dooming, and a 33 MHz 486 offered an experience decent enough for multiplayer. A DX/2 66 was good enough to show off, and any kind of Pentium managed to top out the framerate in all but the most demanding user-made maps of the time. The video card could be a bottleneck, too - folks with 256k Trident VGA cards were at a disadvantage compared to S3, Tseng Labs, or

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

Go in a dark room, aim a bright flashlight at a ceiling, and see what happens.

True radiosity is very computationally expensive, as you say (basically raytracing), but one can fake it for game purposes by creating a faint omni light source at the flashlight's head, and another where the light "beam" intersects any objects. This would have helped Doom 3 TREMENDOUSLY.

I don't think anyone questions that John Carmack is a super-genius, but some of his WTF moments make you wonder if he ever steps outside his "bubble".

The machine gun (forget if there was another name for it) did indeed have a flashlight on it.

Earlier on, I liked that as a gameplay mechanic -- even the duct tape mod doesn't allow it for the pistol alone for that reason. Later on, there's better lighting in general, so it's not as much of an issue.

Now he should apologize for the hilariously outdated use of monster closets, terrible storyline, idiotic directorial decisions (no flashlight on guns, only 60 seconds of air!!) and extreme "meh"-ness of the entire Doom 3 experience.

Normally, you're happy when a game experience lasts 20+ hours. With Doom 3 it was more like, "there's more? Fuck me!" Especially after you beat the boss from hell, and have to go *back* to Mars for another few hours of tedium.

Thats how i played. In our wet basement too (seriously). My wife and daughter would sneak down the stairs and scare the crap out of me. I really liked Doom 3. I also really liked quake 4 (single player for both). For serious fraging however, quake 3 is still on the money.

No way, man. I was scared out of my pants playing it under full lighting at noon. Of course, I also refuse to play Resident Evil 4 past sundown, and I even turn up the lights for the Ravenholm chapter of HL2.

Bah! don't be a wuss, you only live once and a good scare is good for you, gets the blood pumping and all. if you have the original Half Life (and who doesn't? They might as well have given away copies with boxes of Tide considering how common that game was in everyone's collections) get a killer single player mod called "They Hunger" parts one through three and play THAT in the dark. The sounds and "cheap shots" on that game are awesome!

Several years ago I asked him the same question by phone. Basic story was that his copy of the Commander Keen projects were lost during a move into their new offices, but someone else (Romero) might still have a copy. He also shared that the source code was very simplistic, almost embarrassing at the time we spoke, and that anyone with a little motivation could make a better game engine. Good point, but I still think it should be made available for historical purposes if anyone still has it. I bet comme

Fact is that opengl/DX and the hardware to back it up, have made solid 3d engines much easier to write at an acceptable standard. Quake 1 came out before we all had hardware 3d. Hell it was very influential to creating that market. Writing something that *worked* at all was hard. All the original iD titles pushed hardware to the edge and did things others just couldn't replicate. Its not then anymore.

Computers got much faster. Carmack was a good implementer, but most of the stuff that he implemented had been presented in graphics conferences earlier (not all of it, but a lot). His skill was doing stuff on a commodity PC that academics were doing on a high-end workstation. Now, there's not so much demand for that. Any moderately competent coder can take a load of SIGGRAPH papers, implement them, and end up with an engine. The difference in skill level has gone from meaning the difference between 'ru

One of the two games who's engine went GPL is Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It was already a freeware game. Sadly its engine was getting old as people struggled to get its OSS audio working on newer distros with ALSA/Pulseaudio. I look forward to that being fixed on other great improvements being made to Wolf ET.

Honestly, the fact that the engine is "getting old" is the reason they opened up the source. They aren't going to make any more money out off of it and students/hobbyists will love being able to tinker with it.

You know, about 5 years ago, I bet a lot of people would have been very excited about GPL release of ET. I suppose someone will probably do something with it, but this seems ridiculously long after the game's publication.

ET wasn't even a revenue generating game for them - they gave it away for free (well, I do remember seeing some copies for sale at computer stores - I guess you can get some people to pay for something they could just download for free, legally).

I know that iD makes some (maybe a considerable portion) of their revenue licensing out their engines to other commercial game developers (maybe even developers of non-game simulators, not sure), but even so - did anyone license the ET engine? I mean, I know it was basically the Q3A engine with some modifications - did anyone care about those specific modifications? Anyhow, releasing the game engine as GPL source release doesn't stop them from generating revenue from licensing it for commercial (non-GPL) use. Why wait so long?

Buh, wah? The Q3A engine was GPL'ed years ago. What would be so special about the ET Engine, which would prevent it's release, because of some contract agreement with one of iD's licensee's? Other than Splash Damage (I suppose maybe they didn't want it open sourced before), was there any licensee of the ET engine? The other poster who responded said no one licensed the ET engine?

The following additional terms ("Additional Terms") supplement and modify the GNU General Public License, Version 3 ("GPL") applicable to the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory GPL Source Code ("Wolf ET Source Code"). In addition to the terms and conditions of the GPL, the Wolf ET Source Code is subj

Proof of Concepts are usually built around one hardware model so they don't have to dick around spending tons of manhours making it work on a wide array of hardware/os'. I have an android, so understand that I say this with zero fanboyism, but Apple pretty much has a more or less single piece of hardware with very small variances in parts used. They could write the software to take advantage of the hardware and have a large number of devices be able to run it. Do that on an android phone and you basically have to pick _one_ phone to do it on. Again, I love Android but lets say they picked the XT720 (the one I have). Well, Cincinnati Bell is currently the only US carrier offering it. They would have a game that would run on a handful of phones. The iPhone just works for their PoC purpose.

...And a lot of the reason that Android users don't spend a ton of money on apps are threefold.

A) Android has a lot of really good free apps and it has lite apps that don't suck.

B) Most people who use Android aren't the type of people who spend lots and lots of money on needless things.

C) With no restrictions on app development, the person who makes a $.99 fart application loses business to the teenager with an hour of free time and an SDK who makes his own one and releases it for free for his own amusement. With the iPhone that app might cost $50 or more to develop.

Next up is Android. Carmack asked people in the crowd how many people had Androids (a vocal minority, he assessed), and how many had spent more than $20 in the phone's app store. He said he's been checking regularly to see how popular the phones are, and it's to the point where Carmack is starting to think about when the company will bring its products to the platform. It's probably not going to be in the next six months, he said.

Any clues or outright answers as to where I can download John Carmack's entire keynote? Even just audio would be acceptable. I managed to watch the rocketry talk today with him and Richard Garriott. It was fascinating.

Android -> Dvalik.Android also has support for OpenGL and Native C++ Code [arstechnica.com], but still probably no.

The real time "shadows" seemed to be just dark spot decals.Also, I didn't see any dynamic lighting besides the most basic directional vertex lighting on the moving models;Otherwise it looked like a bunch of precomputed lightmaps/textures to me.

Meh. It's "Rage" (or IDTech5) only in name.Many Android phones could handle this no problem...

I don't see what the big deal is. Article title should have been: "id sti

Have you ever used a phone for gaming? It sucks. Even when emulators run beautifully for it, you either have to get a GameGripper-like device to use the keyboard or hook up a Wii controller via bluetooth to play it.

Using a phone as a controller would be one of the worst moves ever (even worse than the Wii's basic controller)

Have you ever used a PC for gaming. It sucks. you need a dedicated keyboard *and* mouse to play anything:)

sure, phones aren't designed for gaming controls (erm, except the upcoming Playstation phone [arstechnica.com]) so I doubt anyone would expect great things from it. If gaming is to take off on the phone, then I expect to see accessories to become available - like a keyboard and mouse - and a hdmi connector to the TV so your gaming experience on your new small PC...erm phone... is as good as the experience on your large

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought a megatexture was the opposite of what you're suggesting: It's where you load a single, complete texture into memory just to avoid 1) chunking it up, and 2) coming up with some sort of demand-load/page-otherwise scheme.

It wasn't really possible until game machines had sufficient memory that taking up a huge chunk of RAM with a megatexture was possible. But once it was a reasonable assumption about the minimal hardware, loading a single giant texture beca

I don't think even today's systems have enough memory to load an entire megatexture into memory. Remember that Carmack is using megatextures to provide terrain detail, so the texture can get pretty huge. Then again, I don't think Carmack has ever released any technical details on megatextures, so I could be wrong.

MegaTexture refers to a texture allocation technique facilitating the use of a single extremely large texture rather than repeating multiple smaller textures. It is featured in Splash Damage's game, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and was developed by id Software technical director John Carmack.[1]

MegaTexture employs a single large texture space for static terrain. The texture is stored on removable media or the hard drive and st

Right now, textures are usually a bunch of smaller files. So your rocks will have some various rock textures, your roads will have some road textures and so on. There are placed on objects and tessellated as needed. The potential problem is it means things can look too much the same. I mean say I have only one rock texture and every rock gets it. They'll all look an awful lot a like in that case.

So the idea with megatexture is you don't do that. Instead you have one single texture for all the ground, and probably all the world geometry. There is no repetition, no tessellation. As with the real world, everything is unique. The game engine then handles swapping in what parts of this massive texture are actually needed at a given time.

Neat idea I'll say that, remains to be seen how it works. Ultimately there's got to be artists behind things and their time is money. Will they really design everything from scratch, or will they do copy-paste but just in the image editor rather than in the game engine? I'm also not sure how it interacts with shaders. These days more and more of games are procedural, meaning you describe things with programs that run on the GPU. I haven't seen if you can have shaders and apply them to given things (like a metal shader that makes metal shiny) or if you have to have one giant displacement map, specular map, and so on.